On November 3, 2017, the Friday of homecoming weekend at USC, Kaya Press hosted its annual Visions and Voices event with Kaya authors Anelise Chen and Q.M. Zhang in conversation with Los Angeles–based writers Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus around the topic of hybrid fiction.

To usher in the discussion, each writer first read from their own hybrid works. Kaya author Anelise Chen read from her debut So Many Olympic Exertions, a novel that explores grief and failure through the world of sports while Q.M. Zhang read from her semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical family history, Accomplice to Memory. Following her was Tisa Bryant, who revisited Unexplained Presence, her 2007 book investigating the presumed absence of black bodies in film and literature then Chris Kraus capped off the program with a section from her now famous auto-fiction novel, the eponymous I Love Dick.

After the readings, the four writers discussed the elusive nature of hybrid genre—the radical self-reflexivity present throughout each of their works and the feminist literary tradition it often dovetails, before opening their conversation to an ever-attentive and thoughtful audience.

It was an event teeming with insight and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for 2018’s event!